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Video: Houdini’s Siggraph user group presentation

Side Effects Software has posted a video showing part of its Siggraph user group meeting. (Actually, to be strictly accurate, it’s a collection of stills and presentation slides with audio commentary.)

There’s a bit of preamble about the company, but the guts of the video is Jeff Wagner’s presentation on Houdini 11.1, and the upcoming Houdini 12.

The main themes will be familiar to anyone who has read Side Effects’ online preview, but the presentation fleshes out a lot of the details, and contextualises the claims for increased performance over Houdini 11.

There’s over 25 minutes of footage, though, so if you’re pushed for time, you can see the running order below:

04:00 The new geometry engineMore at 06:15 on the need to rewrite tools developed for Houdini 11.

05:30 MultithreadingIncludes a useful chart on exactly which parts of the architecture are multithreaded in 11 and 12.

07:00 Performance test resultsInteresting snippet at 11:30 on the new performance monitor.

15:30 Updates to MantraIncluding full implementation of physically based rendering, raytracing derivatives for volumes, support for IES lights and better hair shading.